Postings, meandering thoughts and rants
from a former-Libertarian-again-Republican, hawkish Texan.

Wednesday, August 04, 2004

Truckers Coordinate to Guard US Highways

Okay, being stuck behind them on the highway can be suck, but I understand the importance of truck drivers to the economic vitality of our nation. Heck, my dad spent about two decades in a rig. However, I did not know the role truckers are filling in the homeland defense efforts.

U.S. anti-terrorism officials recently alerted the public that al-Qaeda terrorists may be planning a truck bomb attack in the northeastern United States. The nation's trucking industry has been on alert for some time, in large part, due to a federally-funded, $20 million program called Highway Watch.

"We have a pledge. It's a person pledge. It's an industry pledge and that's to do our level best to see that one of our trucks is never used as a weapon," says Mike Russell, a spokesman for the American Trucking Association (ATA), the trade group that represents more than three million truck drivers nationwide.

If anyone wants to see how dangerous a trucker's life can be or how tough these people really are, I suggest this movie.

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About Me

Okay, so it's an old photo from 1990. Welcome to Target Centermass. My name's Dave Wylie and, if I look angry in the photo, it's probably because I'd just learned that I had to pay for that Ft. Knox 30-seconds-and-it's-all-gone first haircut.

I enlisted as a tank crewman into the Texas Army National Guard in 1990 while attending Texas A&M. I graduated from A&M in 1993 and left the military (for now) in 1999. In the areas of politics and journalism, I have been involved in some campaigns at the grassroots level, interned on Capitol Hill and contributed to several trivial publications in a variety of areas of interest through the years. Unrelated to all of this, I'm currently working in the software field in the Dallas area.

Target Centermass is my place for commenting on politics and current events, all with an openly libertarian/conservative, hawkish tint. I'm rarely timely, but will post on items I feel deserve more attention or about which I have a strong opinion. I reserve the right to post about anything I damn well please. All views expressed are strictly my own unless otherwise specified.